omnipotence of his native city. But it did not cease to frighten and intimidate him.
"Shall I again be repulsed and held at a distance?" he asked himself.
And in its proud raiment Antwerp, in its turn, seemed to him the incarnation of a no less haughty and triumphant creature.
One night when going to theater in full evening dress, his Cousin Gina had been so dazzling that an ineluctable impulse had precipitated him toward her like a ruffian. But the radiant young girl had foreseen his movement of adoration. She had settled herself, waved aside his candid idolatry with a distant gesture, as if it were unclean dust, and with a desperately even voice, without pleasure, without even the gleam of satisfaction that all homage, even the shallowest, calls up in a woman's face, she said to him:
"Go away, silly! You will crumple my flounces!"
Yes, his city, too rich, too beautiful, too vast for her foster child, deceived Laurent that evening.
"Is she, too, going to wave me aside, as if I were valueless and unworthy?" he asked himself in anguish.
But it was as if the adorable city, less hard and less cruel than the woman, had read the distress of the declassed youth and determined that nothing should spoil the intoxication of his emancipation before he had entirely succumbed to grief, and the flaming sky dulled its too brilliant radiance, and at the same moment, the water, into which it seemed that rubies had been poured, took on its normal appearance. The twilight air became tender and fluid once again; the waves were velvety with a fleeting mist, on the horizon there was but the vague memory of the furious kindling that had terrified Paridael.
